Anomander @ Anomander @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

Tumblr remains impressively Not Dead given its ownership and finance history.

If you are in fact a doppelganger you have no way of knowing and neither does the Anomander who died. And that is why I wouldn't risk teleportation.

Which, conversely, is also why I don't care about teleportation. If I have no idea before and I have no idea after and for all intents and purposes I am still me in the new location ... all the parts that I can engage with, all the parts I care about - they're all coming up fine. I might as well have fallen asleep on a plane, or blacked out after a few too many at the pub. When consciousness returns, I am in a new location.

In that explanation you quoted, I fall firmly into the former camp. I don't think we have special-ness that transcends the meat, but that the consciousness is wholly rooted in it - and so I think that moving the meat from one place to another achieves the result of moving the consciousness from one place to another.

My main difference is that I don't believe a "soul" transported or transplanted - or exists to be lost. The consciousness that is my sense of 'self' is the sum of my meat and my memories, and those are preserved.

But trying to make you understand.

Yeah, there's your problem. You're trying to make me understand it your way and criticizing me for not doing so, instead of trying to persuasively state your own viewpoints standing on their own.

It's an approach that I can imagine would feel frustrating when I already understand your views and am talking about them.

To me it has nothing to do with souls, it's about continuity of experience. [...] If I don't get to continue to experience life because I'm dead and some clone with my exact thoughts etc is now me, it's only the rest of the world who experiences that as me continuing to live. But I don't get to.

I think that distinction is artificial.

My continuity of experience is interrupted every night, among others - and I don't worry that my experience as being me is somehow invalid now, or fear sleeping lest a doppelganger take my body overnight and wake up 'as me' the next morning. The idea that this would be different is resting on the notion that there is something other than mere meat and electricity that would be lost when the teleport interrupts consciousness, and I think that assumption is something that needs direct challenge.

I think you would experience life continuing from the moment consciousness resumes in the new location, the exact same as how you experience life 'continuing' when you wake up each day. All the ways that you experience your own consciousness would simply have relocated. Without assuming a soul, there is no subjective distinction between pre/post teleporter any more than there's a distinction between pre/post nap.

This presumes that there is something special in this model that doesn’t resume when your mind resumes running in it’s new location. Or, in other terms, “a soul”.

That is ridiculous.

So you do see my point.

People aren't computers, so getting all worked up about how software models instances still isn't a valid modelling for human consciousness.

When you kill a process and you re-run a program, even if you saved the full state of the memory elsewhere, you don’t say that it’s the same process. Is another process with identical content. There’s no need of a metaphysical entity. It’s another instance.

But this is so hair-splittingly pedantic it's almost doubled back to be incorrect. If you ask 99.999% of the world, they'll be like "yeah I closed outlook and then I opened outlook" - to them, it's still the same program. They're launching the same software again. No one is like "oh well once you quit Skyrim it's all over because even if you reopen it later, it's a new instance and the old one is dead" ... no. That's ridiculous. It's the same program, the same save file, resumed from save at a later date.

Your focus on "Process" instead of "Program" is making the soul argument. The "process" you're arguing for is a soul. Something intangible and irrelevant to the end user, that does get terminated on shutdown, that cannot be restored from save. Consciousness is the software, not the process itself. Memories are the save file. There is nothing in OP's model of teleporting that suggests "process" itself is the sacred portion - when the hardware & software of "Dave" gets paused and resumed flawlessly.

You’re deeply, sorely mistaken. Even in a deep, unconscious state, the mind keeps working, even if the degree of consciousness is different. That we’re not 100% certain of what the brain does in those moments doesn’t mean that it stops working.

Not at all. Consciousness is interrupted. Unless we're assuming that the "process" itself is sacred - what happens to consciousness is all that matters in either case. If your ability to perceive yourself as a conscious being stops - it doesn't matter to your experience of your own consciousness if the 'process' stopped or went to sleep during the gap.

That's absolutely the issue.

Your body is copied as a file.

Your mind is a process running in a body created from that file.

When the process stops, you are effectively dead. Another copy of your body runs another process with an identical content. He has your body, but he’s not you.

This presumes that there is something special in this model that doesn't resume when your mind resumes running in it's new location. Or, in other terms, "a soul". The idea that an identical consciousness in an identical body is "not you" is based wholly on the assumption that "you" is something other than the consciousness.

And your mind, or my mind, are both "processes" that stop regularly already - are you claiming that old you dies each night and a completely new but otherwise identical person lives each morning?

or in a real teleport where you are disassembled, you're gone the moment

I love how this was said completely unironically.

We're talking about something that only exists in sci-fi stories and you're trying to argue about souls as if one outcome of teleports is clearly more real than another.

you're gone the moment you teleport and the "you" that remains is another different person with exactly your thoughts, feelings, motivations, memories, etc

Ship of Thesius, though. If it's exactly my thoughts, exactly my feelings, exactly my motivations, my memories, my body ... That's me. There's no other parts that got left out.

But consciousness was interrupted briefly when the transport happened? That happens to me every night - except in the morning I wake up in the same place instead of a different one. For all worthwhile intents and purposes, everything tangible and real that makes a person a person is relocated and the person remains. Getting lost in whether or not "you" "survive" is wasting angst on the existence of a soul.

You're repeating what OP said.

Thing is, the idea that an "old you" has "died" is a modern soul conceit. If "me" is just the combination of meat, electricity, and memories - then for all intents and purposes I was simply taken apart in one place and reassembled in another. Continuity of all three is maintained when I am reassembled on Mars with my body and memories intact. There is no "old" and "new" me - because what you or OP think defines "me" isn't something that dies when the meat stops working briefly.

I think there were a lot of players up and down the ranks waiting to see which way the wind blew before casting for any given side.

With so many concerns that the coup had backing from either Putin or other power blocs, a whole lot of side players would have wanted to back a winning pony and were waiting on early outcomes. Equally, with Putin not providing decisive action, I'm sure that invited meaningful concerns that this was some sort of double-dealing or the beginning of a Putin-backed purge.

Absolutely this.

Someone else can be the guinea pig, but if it's been tested and everyone came out fine? Yeah. I'll absolutely take advantage.

Very much so.

If this coin's math and mechanics actually work in transferring wealth from rich to poor ... it'll be swamped in poor people wanting their cut, and rich people will want nothing to do with a shitcoin that's explicitly going to take their money and give it to other people.

My comment was clearly not written to give you advice for your specific child and her suite of issues.

I'm speaking a lot more generally and while I'm leaving room for parents like you to make your choices, I'm also still being direct that I think it's not a good universal rule. Even if that is an outcome someone chooses, it's no less true that engaging with the whole choice is necessary to do a good job of making it. Internet=bad is an incredibly simplistic old-person take at this stage in society, and some parents even to current generations can misunderstand or underestimate the significant role that the internet can play in their kids' lives. No solution fits across all kids, that's part of the challenge - but understanding the role that the internet plays in modern kids' social world and peer networks is important to making decisions about their access to it with complete information and goal-oriented integrity.

The matched point in that comment you may have missed is that I'm not modelling my remarks around a binary of "unrestricted internet" vs "no internet." If anything, I think I was clearly saying that absolute 'solutions' get progressively worse the wider they cast their net - as more and more unintended consequences are included in that broad-reaching choice.

Separately, you also shouldn't expect that what you felt you needed to do in order to support your child in a relatively unusual situation - will also be a good foundation for broad-case parenting practices. What is good for one child is not good for all children - and the more unusual the child or their needs, the less applicable that solution would be to "average" kids. There are other kids in similar-looking situations where your solution would exacerbate the problem instead of reduce it - now not only are they depressed and bullied, but also isolated from their friends. The vast majority of kids aren't in situations particularly similar to yours and using your solution in their cases risks putting them into worse places than they started, or putting a target on them where none existed prior. Sever the child from the internet isn't something you necessarily should be treating as universally good for all parents and all kids with zero possible downsides.

There are always downsides. Especially in parenting, everything is a trade-off and nothing is clear-cut. If you can't see what's being traded off - in effectively anything - that's a good cue to start hunting for blind spots. Especially when making rules for kids like cutting off parts of their world. As you said, being a parent requires making tough choices, and that requires engaging with the whole cost/benefit of the choice.

There's nothing challenging or tough about firmly believing you are wholly, completely, and absolutely Correct in whatever option you pick. It's easy to choose something and insist that it's 100% totally and absolutely correct with zero room for discussion. That approach actively shuts down all the actually hard parts of making the choice. But that is a choice with it's own downsides. It makes it hard to relate to those kids as they age enough to challenge you, or start leaving home, and it doesn't model behavior that I - personally - think is producing functional adults down the road. At the very least, the kind of person who is never wrong is not the kind of person I want to raise.

So I think that commenting more specifically on what you've said here - it rings some bells and tints some flags. You're proudly teaching your kids critical thinking, yet also say you cannot see any downsides to cutting off social media completely. You're absolutely blase about deeming all kids who use social media "toxic" and "bad friends" with "struggles" as if it's completely normal, healthy, and definitely non-toxic for an adult to be passing those kind of judgements about children on such a trivial basis, and to model that for their own kids. You talk about one child's needs to justify the choice, but have more than that one affected by it. You reacted as if this is already a hot-button issue to you - and responded to remarks clearly speaking generally and not at all targeting to you as if it was a personal attack, returning fire with a bunch of spicy jibes about me as a person and as a parent. If this is how you experience and respond to an opinion you disagree with on the internet, I can certainly imagine how you deal with faintest hints of dispute from your own children. Of course they're telling you what you want to hear.

The calls are coming from inside the house, friend.

I think maybe some of that is on me; I've been using "in power" somewhat colloquially and to me there's a gap between 'gaining power' in a soft sense referring to achieving a station that possesses power - and complete seizure of power. The latter is always the goal of the former, but the former is generally a necessary intermediary step.

It seems to me that the current crop of neo-fascist (or fascist-adjacent as you call them) leaders have remained in power for a very long time, even with more or less fair elections. Erdogan in Turkey, Netenyahu in Israel, and Orban in Hungary come to mine.

Those three for sure have held power quite a while - just that they've held power long enough I don't really consider them representative of modern neo-fascism so much as inspirations for it. In the sense I was thinking of when I wrote the above, I was thinking more of the factions and leaders that exist within states that are not clearly semi- or pseudo-fascist in their structure. The ways that Erdogan, Netenyahu, and Orban maintain their power are not yet in place in those other states, but implementing some forms of them are goals within those movements.

The neo-fascists' I was talking about have to win elections and hold legitimate power within the current structure of the state before they can alter that structure enough to fix elections or bypass them. And in getting that initial foot in door, creating the opportunity to hijack the state, benefits strongly from using populist rhetoric - as genuinely pro-fascist voters are relatively rare, those factions and leaders need to use other causes to win over voters who wouldn't support their "real" goals directly.

I think that this is like wrapping a kid in bubble-wrap, though. And like, not in that "over-coddling" metaphorical sense, but much more literal - sure, the kid can't get scrapes if they fall off their bike, but the other kids are going to make fun of the kid wearing bubble wrap.

You don't necessarily want to give them an unrestricted mainline to the worst of the internet, but you don't want to overcorrect so hard that you're causing other problems.

As toxic as it is, as much as there's space for harms and bullying, or that the internet holds porn and violent content ... the internet and social media spaces are where a huge portion of kids social lives live, and barring them from participating in that will do one of two things - teach them to get sneaky in order to bypass the restriction, or force them into an 'outsider' role in their peer group. In the first, it's a lost cause and all you're doing is making it inconvenient without addressing the harms - and ensuring they can't talk to you about what comes from that space. In the latter, there are strong social and self-esteem costs associated with excluding your child from having a social life with other children - is it "better" for the parent to do the harm instead of the other children? Is it better for your relationship with that child, long-term, their trust in you, or your ability to support them?

The kid restricted to "dumb phone only, no internet, no apps" is the current generations' equivalent of that one kid that wasn't allowed to go to the park, or the mall, or hang out on the street - whatever any given past generation used as their youthful Third Place, where they could socialize and hang out separate from school and without adults actively supervising them. And it's never been great for the kid whose parents won't let them participate in the common social life that their peers have.

It's far more fruitful to give them age-appropriate education related to their use of and relationship with the internet and provide a controlled and supported introduction than it is to simply bar their access for several years. You're either stunting their social development in order to avoid harms to their social development (?!?!) or you're simply winding the proverbial rubber band tighter and tighter against an inevitable rebellion - at which point they're jumping in headlong without ever developing any sort of media literacy or social media savvy and never had a chance to build coping and resilience for whatever rabbit holes they're likely to fall into .

Yeah. Rather a decent number of communities have actually moved to Discord, or are trying to, including a decent sampling of larger communities like MFA.

There's been some kind of wonky takes in Fediverse about some of those moves that seem to reject the validity of migrations that aren't coming to our spaces. Mods will post "going to Discord, fuck this place" and they're like "it's temporary, Discord isn't a forum".

Absolutely, I’m gobsmacked nobody seems to read history.

Although, a lot of these nowadays fascist leaders are being supported by very large swathes of their own populations, as much as 48%, which is the truly shocking thing.

Reading history ... that tends to be how it works. Fascism is good at getting popular support for it's ideas, without overtly being fascism to the people who support it. Fascism's gateway drug is populism, and populism works best when the 'common' population is under strain too complex to address as a single issue.

The worlds ongoing climate crises, economic issues, and political instability within developing economies are all placing unusual and complicated strains on the common populations of developed nations - which in turn opens the door for populist rhetoric and leaders to thrive and gain a foothold on the political discourses in their nations. The biggest single pro/con of populist rhetoric is that it is at its strongest as challenger or as opposition - much like armchair quarterbacking, it's very easy to criticize what has been done, and even easier to sound like you could do it better, but very hard to deliver on promises from the drivers' seat. As a result, populism is good for getting elected, but is not good for staying there - or getting re-elected later.

So given that many populist talking points in current economies are fascist-adjacent, pivoting towards fascism makes for an easy and natural segue in the event that they gain power or hold sufficient security of position and supporter base that populism alone cannot serve to maintain.

Sure; it's just so good at being a chat app that it makes a terrible forum.

My understanding is that it can be done and with a whole host of third party tools and bots and a little legion of mods - but that's a ton of work both setup and ongoing, just to reshape Discord into the sort of format that Reddit or Kbin/Lemmy offer pretty much right out the box.

The issue there is that it's kind of like saying "the only way to fix society is if everyone followed the law" - it places all assessments of success behind a nearly impossible standard. It also places all responsibility for that success solely onto mods putting their own interests ahead of their communities and/or the interest that brought them to volunteer as mods.

I participated in the protest, I'm here because of them, I facilitated protest actions within 'my' communities that wanted to protest - but I don't think there was a world where mods alone could bring the site to its knees and force Reddit to backpedal. If anything - I think that any hope of dramatic action causing change died on the spot the moment the protest became "about mods" and users experienced the protest as something mods were doing to communities in order to reach Reddit.

So many mods acted unilaterally to shutter communities and the impact of that approach cultivated reddit's existing anti-mod sentiments to fuel opposition to the protests and the cause. The vast bulk of people I saw trolling in protest subs, or arguing against protest in my own subs, were users who already had a history of disliking "reddit mods" as a significant theme in their account history.

But to average users, their shit and their communities and the things they like about reddit were being "taken away" by mods in a dispute between mods and Reddit. The hijack of messaging around the API to be about modding and about how much harder it'd be and how the API changes would affect mods - meant that users were also indirectly being told this was an issue that didn't affect them if they didn't use the apps affected.

The only dramatic impact that would have swayed Reddit Inc and won the matter was a fairly unanimous buy-in from the average user, a clear unified front, and a dramatic drop in user engagement. As long as they have the data showing that people are showing up and are using the site and are interested in using the site, they can deal with the interruptions to major communities and pull more compliant volunteers from the users that remain.

I keep mine next to my tiger-repellent rock!

Back as a young fella, striking out in the dating market a bunch ...

"Just be yourself!"

No, honestly, that was the problem last time - I was looking for something a little more granular and actionable.

This is one of those helpful and encouraging things that people say without necessarily really thinking it through. Deep down in intent, they're right - you can't fake your way to healthy relationships, being insincere or putting on a performance of being someone you're not isn't going anywhere genuine down the road. Absolutely correct, absolutely great advice - but it's never given in sufficient complexity and depth to be useful.

None of those grown-ups were like "Ah yes, definitely be sincere about who you are - but also don't spend a whole date monologuing about the book you just read or your favourite video game."

That you can be genuine and sincere about who you are, while still using your social skills and putting your best foot forward socially just ... didn't occur. At the time, my understanding was that it was a hard binary - either I was 100% me at 100% volume and whatever came out of my mouth was definitely the best thing I could say, or I was stifling myself and being 'fake' in order to build an equally-fake relationship.

It took a friend's brother taking me aside to make it 'click' - he was holding a can or a bottle and was like "So the whole object is all 'real you' yeah? But any time you're talking to someone is like right now - you can only see the side that's facing you. It's all you, it's all honest, but you still want to show them the best side, the best angle, of the whole thing. Don't sprint straight to showing them all of your worst angle just because that's what's on your mind that day."